BIG DEAL; At the Level Club, 'Funky' for Sale

By SARAH KERSHAW

Published: October 2, 2011

OUTSIDE, the Level Club, a condominium on the Upper West Side, still bears many signs of its original purpose: it was the headquarters in the 1920s for social and business gatherings of a group of Freemasons known as the Levelers.

Inside, the building on West 73rd Street today contains 144 condos and rentals of varying shapes and sizes and highly unusual layouts, making for what the broker who handles listings there, Lawrence Schier of the Corcoran Group, described as ''downtown living, uptown.''

Put another way, he said, the interiors are ''funky.''

One of the penthouses, inhabited for 15 years by the same couple, is on the market for $3.795 million. It is indeed funky, both in its asymmetry (14-foot ceilings in some rooms and 6-foot ceilings in others that require crouching and ducking) and its d?r (bright pink and blue Venetian plaster walls).

The couple, with four children, bought three other apartments in the building for three of them, and one of those, a one-bedroom, is also for sale, for $825,000. The penthouse, with three bedrooms, two baths, two terraces and about 1,700 square feet of space, first went on the market in 2009 for $4.795 million; it was taken off in 2010, and is being relisted this weekend.

The couple declined to be identified or interviewed.

The Romanesque-style facade, designed in the image of King Solomon's Temple and declared a landmark, bears original details that the Levelers commissioned, including carvings of symbols important to the Masons: the all-seeing eye, the hourglass, the level, the hexagram and the beehive.

The subtitle of a book about the building, ''The Level Club,'' by Bruno Bertuccioli (Watermark Press, 1991), describes its history as ''A New York City Story of the Twenties: Splendor, Decadence and Resurgence of a Monument to Human Ambition.''

Mr. Schier, who had worked in the fashion industry but went into the real estate business in 1999, 15 years after he became the Level Club's first condo owner in 1984, describes himself as the resident ''mayor.'' He has also pieced together a detailed history of the building's travels through time.

At 253 West 73rd Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue, it was reborn as a condominium in 1984, after incarnations as a kosher hotel and a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.

The Levelers opened the club in 1927, according to Mr. Bertuccioli's book, and it has since embodied the Art Deco design that began to populate the city's architectural landscape in the 1920s. Even so, it has always been overshadowed among historians and other real estate watchers by its famous neighbor, the Ansonia, at Broadway and 73rd Street.

The Levelers enjoyed the club for only three years, as they went bankrupt in the Depression and the property went into foreclosure. The building went on to live its other lives, and its name changed several times. But when it became a condominium, the name was changed back to the Level Club.

E-mail: bigdeal@nytimes.com

PHOTOS: A penthouse relisted at the Level Club, lobby above, has varying ceiling heights, and distinctive features like bright pink and blue walls. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES)